As the father of an 8 year old daughter, I was horrified when I heard the very first reports of the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. My horror and abject sadness only deepened as the picture of what happened emerged. I cannot fathom the evil or degree of mental aberration that would be needed to execute 6 and 7 year old children one after the other, pausing only to kill teachers and staff who attempted to come to their rescue. Nor can I imagine how someone deranged enough to commit such acts was allowed to walk in public amongst the rest of us. I honestly don’t care to know anything about him, nor will I endeavor to remember his name and I certainly won’t use it here. A despicable piece of humanity snuffed out the life of 20 children for some reason that died with him when he took the coward’s way out and killed himself so as not to face accountability for his actions. We as a nation now have to address the issue not only of Gun Control, but also Mental Illness and what to do about both.
Juxtaposed against the madness of the gunmen is the utter heroism of the school staff. The school’s principal Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach, the school’s psychologist, ran towards the first sounds of gunfire, confronting the gunman in an attempt to protect their students and were murdered in cold blood. First grade teacher Victoria Soto rushed her students into a closet as the first gunshots rang out and then shielded her students with her body when the madman entered her classroom, as did Special Education teacher Anne Marie Murphy. Both teachers died doing their best to protect the children they desperately loved. Other teachers saved dozens of lives, while risking their own. The school’s music teacher Maryrose Kristopik barricaded a door with instruments, holding the knob as the maniac beat on it, and first-grade teacher Kaitlin Roig rushed her 15 students into a bathroom and barricaded the door with an old bookshelf, using her body weight to keep it in place. There are dozens more stories of teachers and staff taking similarly heroic measures to protect their charges. Nowhere among those stories though is the elephant in the room: one teacher, armed with a handgun of their own, and trained to use it, could have ended the tragedy before it truly started.
I know, I know what some of you are saying already, “We have to ban guns, not give them to teachers”. While that might seem as an answer to the problem it doesn’t begin to address it in any substantive way. It is a juvenile response to an adult problem. Don’t believe me? Well how about we just start with the desire to BAN guns, all guns. How EXACTLY would you go about that? Would you just tell the firearms industry that they can no longer sell weapons to anyone other than the government or the military? Okay. That stops future weapons from entering the community, while throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work I might add, but does less than nothing about the guns already in private hands. Less than nothing you say? Why that’s preposterous! Really? What’s the quickest way to assure that something becomes more valuable? Have a finite number of it. The weapons currently owned, legally or illegally, just became more precious and people on both sides of the law will stop at little to acquire and hold onto them. Previously law abiding citizens will hide their weapons and criminals will attempt to acquire more through the normal illegal channels. Both sides will do this as a hedge against the future. Let’s ignore that pesky little fact though.
So, now we’ve banned all future gun sales. Now what? “Well we start taking them away from EVERYONE except cops! That’s what”, you say. Umm… okay, but how EXACTLY do you propose to do that? Are you going to demand that people turn them in voluntarily by a date picked by you and then send the local constabulary house to house to collect the rest? House to house in every city, town, village and farm? Huh, good luck with that strategy. Some of the bad guys will choose the moment when Officer Friendly knocks on the door to collect his weapons to begin his final shoot-out, which just ties up the other cops busy making their allotted confiscations of weapons. Yep, bullets will be flying then for sure, but that’s okay because eventually the cops will outgun the bad guy and he’ll commit suicide by cop. Some places, ala Ruby Ridge or Waco will require a larger law enforcement presence to affect the ban, and it won’t be just one place, nor will there be many peaceful resolutions. That’s okay too though because after a decade, or so, of dogged determination by our local LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers) all the guns and ammo will have been collected and we’ll have thinned the national herd of some disagreeable sorts. Of course, along the way all manner of well meaning, but draconian, rights infringing, legislation will have been enacted to combat the gun problem, which won’t be used to limit any other personal freedoms I am sure. Wink, wink.
What would a utopian view of a gun-free America look like? What will the national landscape resemble then? I know what it won’t resemble. It won’t resemble a representative democracy anymore. It would be nothing more than another despotic regime paying lip service to its citizens concerns and rubber stamping elections. “Nahh”, you say, “life will be better and more kumbaya for all of us”. Unfortunately, nothing in history suggests that. The United States came into being because of guns. The Continental Army was a collection of citizen soldiers who brought their own hardware to the fight and, once established as a country, those same individuals expanded the nascent country’s borders with the Colt Peacemaker and the Winchester Model 1873, “The gun that won the West”. We are a nation of gun owners and just as the American Motorcycle Assc. famously remarked about the Hollister riot in 1947, 99% of those owners are law abiding. Just because you’ve never owned, or even fired a weapon, nor know anyone who has, doesn’t mean they are not part of the literal fabric of the country. Millions of men, women and, yes, children eagerly look forward to various hunting seasons and that many more engage in some form of target shooting. Others own one that they haven’t touched in eons, but know exactly where it is just in case. None of those people have done anything that deserves having their personal liberties expunged, but, hey, so what? They’re not Upper East Side or Rodeo Dr friendly anyway.
This could be the place where I could lay out the stats on other types of deaths versus gun deaths. Like the 48,000-98,000 deaths each year attributed to medical errors, or the 33,000 deaths due to a motor vehicle accident that occurred last year on the nation’s highways; a number that continues to go down despite the dire predictions of various agencies when the speed limits were raised. There’s also the unintentional poisoning deaths, 31,758 or unintentional falls, 24,792, or the intentional self harm (suicide) 36,909 to which we must make mention. We should probably throw heart disease, 599,413 cancer, 567,628 and diabetes, 68,705 deaths in her too because there are all manner of lifestyle choices which cause a large portion of those diseases. It has become cliché to say, people don’t kill people, guns do, but, unfortunately that is true. Guns are no more inherently evil than cars or doctors are and no one is considering a ban on those. The idea of banning guns is just more chic because those who argue most vociferously for it are the ones who don’t own any anyway, nor understand why you would want to. When an event such as the Sandy Hook massacre occurs all of us are shaken to our core and just want to do something, anything, to seem to be responding to the tragedy. That is nothing more than posturing for the sake of posturing so that we can all feel better about the ugliness of humanity.
Humans are not inherently evil, nor good in my estimation. We are just that, human. There is no aggressive gene or singular trait that makes us war on ourselves. According to Dr. Agustin Fuentes, writing in the popular accepted journal “Psychology Today”,
“In the human fossil and archeological record there is no good evidence of intense aggression and warfare until very recently, and it is associated with the advent of permanent settlements, agriculture, and social stratification. Increased social inequality and more complex political and economic systems seem to correlate with more types of aggression and violence in human societies. Interestingly, these scenarios also correlate with larger and more complex peaceful relationships amongst and between peoples.”
What that seems to suggest to me is that the more people there are the more aggressive, hostile acts there will be, but they will always be out-numbered by acts of kindness and those of a peaceful nature. Simply put, our biology is not to blame.
All right, so play along with me a while longer. Let’s accept that neither guns, nor humans are inherently evil. What to do then, pragmatically, to make sure that those among us who have the propensity for evil, or violent mental instability, never acquire the firearm means to inflict casualties. A good place to start is to enforce common sense concerning firearms. The Sandy Hook murderer should never have had unfettered access to the weapons legally acquired by his mother. She, unfortunately, paid for her life for that error, along with dozens of innocents. Apparently she was aware of his mental imbalance, but was at a loss to address it. From the news reporting on such shootings, most of the shooters didn’t acquire their weapons through due process, but rather stole them from others. That’s as true of an 18 year old kid who fires a pistol at a person on the subway in Philly because he had the temerity to wear the team jersey of some organization from somewhere else, as it is for more headline making shootings such as Sandy Hook . That doesn’t make it any less true though. The penalties for gun violence, indeed any illegality involving a firearm, need to be stiff and consistently enforced. Legally owned firearms need to be stored safely and securely, with stiff penalties for those who allow them to fall into others hands through carelessness too.
It’s true that mass shootings occur in the United States more often than anywhere else. At least it is true for the sake of this discussion. A resident of Tel Aviv killed with a dozen of his fellows on a bus blown up by terrorists would make no distinction between being dead, with someone shot down protecting children. Dead is dead. Around 50 people were killed in Syria today as fighting between rebels and the government has intensified. The death toll there thus far is somewhere around 40,000, with no end in sight. There are many such places in the world where 26 dead in a day would be an improvement. That’s part of the reason this event shocks the national consciousness. No matter what you may believe, these types of events are still rare. We, quite rightly, are horrified by this one because it involved our children, the innocents among us. In trying to make sense of a senseless act we seek to solve the wrong problem and assuage our collective guilt and sorrow. Banning weapons as a knee jerk reaction to an heinous crime is punishing the wrong actor, while not even preventing the next gruesome event.
When James Brady was wounded by John Hinckley Jr. during his attempted assassination of President Reagan, the outcry for Gun Control was instantaneous. The legislation that resulted, The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act sought to prevent just such an unhinged character as Hinckley from doing just what he did; buy a .22 caliber handgun in a pawnshop with no background check. To that end, it was effective in stopping the sales of firearms to illegal or unlawful owners, but prosecution and convictions of violators of the Brady Bill are rare. Federal oversight, the biggest Big Brother of them all can seldom be bothered to enforce the law, unless there is a splashy news story to spur them. What we get then are a hodge podge of local and state laws that criminalize otherwise legal gun owners. In a rush to extract vengeance from someone for a despicable act we punish people who bore no ill will in some cases, and let others off the hook. What is needed is straight forward enforcement of the federal firearms legislation already in place and zero tolerance policy of punishment for those who commit gun violence, anywhere and anytime. The 18 year old in Philly who fired into a crowded SEPTA train last week should be aggressively punished for his actions and serve a severe sentence for it. His actions are no more mundane for the lack of deaths. In fact, one could argue that since he is still, as of this writing, on the loose that he is more terrifying than a random school shooter is. A school shooter has a soft target in mind. A place where he can go about his gruesome business without fear of retaliation, at least until law enforcement arrives. The SEPTA shooter didn’t care on whom his bullets landed and didn’t seem to care about the number of deaths he could have caused. Nothing, save capture and imprisonment, will stop him from doing that again and again. That shooter believes his action was justifiable for some inane reason, but probably isn’t deranged in the manner of the scumbag in Connecticut. How many more like each shooter exist?
More likely than not, the SEPTA shooter belongs to a class of people who believe that spraying bullets into a train is something that is acceptable in his world. That is truly alarming because a mass murderer is an aberration, but more picayune shootings like this are just that, commonplace to the point where they make only the local news. We may never be able to stop an unsettled maniac from committing a crime of a magnitude that shocks us all, but we can address why it is that a shooting on public transportation, in front of hundreds of witnesses, doesn’t. Sensible solutions to gun violence need to be considered by all of us in civilized society. That means the duck hunter in Tuscaloosa, AL and the gun collector in Lost Creek, WV have to be accepted as equals by the urbane jet set. Both sides need to recognize that while guns are not inherently evil, they are part of the problem and all of us have a responsibility to see to it that we are all as safe in our homes and schools as we can be. Instead of hysteria, blustering and finger pointing we need a grown up discussion replete with both side’s viewpoints on what constitutes gun safety. No one can get all of what he or she wants all the time, and this discussion would be no different. What we could get though is something none of us would ever recognize: we might stop someone else from shocking our consciences with an act like this and isn’t that truly what we all want?
